RANSOM, KIND OF WONDERFUL

Opening in the Valley today at RoadHouse Cinemas in Scottsdale:

Highest 2 Lowest--In Spike Lee's latest, Denzel Washington feels very authentic as David King, a superstar music producer known as "the best ears in the business." You get the impression the performance may reflect a  showbiz type Washington has encountered more than once.

David is a reflexive glad-hander, smiling and chuckling and bantering, yet with a show of underlying gravity, easygoing yet earnest. He's a master of listening, or at least of looking like he's listening.

As the movie starts, David is maneuvering to buy back the record label he founded before it's taken over by a consortium that wants to make music with A.I. The early scenes have the feel of a glossy, glamorous show-business melodrama. But when David gets a call telling him his son has been kidnapped for ransom, the movie quietly downshifts into a thriller.

Then the story takes yet another, even more unsettling twist that puts it into the realm of a moral thriller (stop reading now if you don't want to know it). The kidnapper, it turns out, has napped the wrong kid; not David's son but the son of his beloved ex-con chauffeur and confidant Paul (Jeffrey Wright).

Just that quickly, David's sense of urgency to pay the multi-million-dollar ransom, with money otherwise slated for his business deal, simply evaporates. Eventually, David starts to grasp that not only is Paul's son's life at stake, so is own soul.

You may recognize the basic plot as that of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963), of which this is a heavily embellished but unmistakable remake, with Washington in the Toshiro Mifune role. Time has shown that Lee attempting his own take on Kurosawa is not hubris; he's a master too.

Working from a script by Alex Fox, Lee keeps us on the edge of our seat even while he takes the time to explore character, and to use the New York locations for all they're worth. His approach is charged yet discursive, and the movie glides and swerves and rattles along like a subway ride, unpredictably but never incoherently, to a satisfying destination.

I well remember when Lee first showed up in American movies in the late '80s, and how brashly innovative his techniques seemed. He moved cinema forward. But here, as in his intriguing 2006 bank heist thriller Inside Man, his style seems old-school, loose, adaptable, almost classical.

Of course, none of this stylistic prowess would amount to much if Lee wasn't hugely abetted by Washington, Wright and the rest of the cast, including Ilfenesh Hadera as David's wife, Aubrey Joseph as his son, ASAP Rocky as a mysterious young rapper and John Douglas Thompson, Dean Winters and LaChanze as the cops. Also, Highest 2 Lowest is full of great songs and a driving, at times almost Riverdance-ish score by Howard Drossin. It's maybe the best soundtrack of the year, or possibly a close second to that of Sinners.

SHARKKKLANSMAN

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlannsman and of this weekend's winner at the box office, The Meg.

Yesterday The Kid captured this thoughtful study of Your Humble Narrator...

...as we waited in the car outside a store for The Wife. She texted it to her, with the caption "Dead asleep." The Wife replied "Did you mean, 'Dad asleep?'" She did, but it would have been accurate either way.

THE HUMAN ABSTAIN

Opening this week:

Chi-Raq—The title refers to Chicago, the streets of which are more lethal these days for young black men than Iraq. It also refers to the rapper and gang leader (Nick Cannon) whose girlfriend Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is at the center of Spike Lee’s modern-dress retelling of Aristophanes, much of it played out in rhyming dialogue. Lysistrata leads the girlfriends of rival gangs on Chicago’s south side in a sex strike until the shooting stops.

The middle-aged women in the neighborhood eventually join in, demanding activism from the miserable middle-aged men. Eventually the strikers seize a National Guard armory, and the forces of the Mayor (D. B. Sweeney) and the Police Commissioner (Harry Lennix) lay siege to them there, planning “Operation Hot and Bothered,” in which the ladies are bombarded, Noriega-style, with romantic slow jams.

Farcical as this strand is, Lee and his co-writer Kevin Willmott (of C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America) point to the anti-war sex strike started by Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee in 2003 to show that there are real-life precedents for this sort of action. They also make clear that the object of the protest is no joke: The film includes horrifying violence, including the death of a child from a stray bullet.

I had missed Spike Lee’s last few movies, and Chi-Raq reminded me of how funny he can be. While its free-form structure recalls Lee’s early School Daze (1988), what surprised me is how genuinely Greek it is. It’s a fairly insane movie, but all its messy craziness—the broad characterizations, dirty jokes and slapstick thrown up alongside angry, deadly-serious didactic rants and debates, the meandering plot, the digressions—is at least equally true of Aristophanes.

As always with Lee’s films, much of the energy comes from the acting. Standouts here include veterans like Angela Bassett as the wise lady across the street, Wesley Snipes, giggling like Muttley, as the rival gang leader Cyclops, a raspy-voiced John Cusack as an enraged priest and Samuel L. Jackson, unleashing his peerless verbal exuberance on rhymed couplets of choral commentary.

Vivid as these performers are, however, the glue that holds Chi-Raq together—just barely—is the likable and luscious Lysistrata of Teyonah Parris. She and her fellow strikers certainly make setting down the guns seem worthwhile.